Hidden away in a forest near Brussels is an unassuming wooden cabin. It is here that the man credited with doing more to halt the march of Islamist terrorism in Europe than almost anyone else has lived in secret for the past six months.

Montasser AlDe’emeh, a 29-year-old Islamic academic, is one of the best-known figures in Brussels’ benighted district of Molenbeek, once described as the epicentre of Islamist terrorism. He rose to prominence while conducting research into young Muslim men who had rejected Western values to answer the call of Osama bin Laden and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, leaders of al-Qaeda and Isis. He won their trust and even visited some of the fighters in Syria. But last year his cover was blown. During a court case – in which he was accused of forging a deradicalisation certificate for a known extremist– AlDe’emeh was forced to disclose to the judge that he was an agent working closely with the Belgian security service.

News of his “betrayal” didn’t go down well with the leaders of Isis and Jahbat al-Nusrah, which issued death threats against him. One Isis spokesman, who accused AlDe’emeh of helping the Americans target jihadi training camps, vowed to hunt him down and end his life very slowly and very painfully. AlDe’emeh was forced to seek asylum in Canada but returned to Belgium after the government offered to help him. Sitting on rickety wooden chairs, the only furniture in his sparse one-bedroom hideout, AlDe’emeh explains how dramatically his life has changed. “The [Belgian] security service knew what I was doing but they hadn’t told the police, who had started tapping my phone and come to the wrong conclusion – that I was someone they needed to be worried about.” The security service refused to allay police fears because it didn’t want to disclose that it was running agents the counter-terrorism police knew nothing about. When the case got to trial, the prosecutor presented supporting testimony but the Belgian court still imposed a six-month suspended prison sentence: “I told the judge that the security service always knew what I was doing but even on appeal the conviction against me stood.” His new life means taking special precautions against Isis-sent assassins or violent extremists who have read about the death threats on social media.

A few weeks ago he says he discovered from one of his sources that MI5 had prevented a plot to kill him. “This person who I had never met before travelled all the way from Israel to find me to inform me that I had been in grave danger. He said MI5 had found out about it and somehow stopped it.” Whitehall security sources have declined to confirm or deny this story. “I want to do everything I can, to protect Belgium. I will always help Belgium no matter how I am treated because this is the country I love.”

The story of AlDe’emeh is unusual and yet all too familiar. His parents were born in Palestine when it was a British protectorate but were forced to leave when their village was ethnically cleansed by Zionist militias. The family fled to the West Bank and Jordan before settling in Europe. Two-year-old Montasser, born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Jordan, arrived in Brussels in 1991 with some of his brothers and sisters. He tried to fit in with his new home. But like many young Muslim men the 9/11 terror attacks roused him from his adolescence. The day after the attacks he found himself sitting in school being asked to explain to the rest of the class what had happened: “I was a 12‑year-old boy being held up as a spokesman for Osama bin Laden.” Until that day he had been an ordinary Belgian kid interested only in football and computer games. “I started to want to know more about Islam and this kind of fundamentalist ideology that was changing the world. I read all the books I could find and I travelled to Jordan and Saudi Arabia to learn Arabic and find out all about Islam.” AlDe’emeh was no different from many other Muslim men growing up across Europe. “My first reaction was to join my fellow Palestinians and become a freedom fighter. But what I couldn’t make sense of was why Arab groups like Hamas and Fatah were fighting each other? It made me question everything about the politics of the Middle East.” After completing his masters degree in Arabic and Islam Studies at the Catholic University of Leuven he resolved to serve Belgium. “It was 2012 and the Arab Spring was well under way – so I offered my services.” And his contacts with Belgium’s flourishing circle of jihadis meant he was of great use to the security service. Part of his research included a trip to Syria in 2014 to visit Belgian, Dutch and British fighters as they tried to establish a caliphate. Back in Molenbeek, AlDe’emeh opened a counter-radicalisation centre working with young jihadis who had either returned from Syria or intended to travel there to fight. “[Isis] fighters were telling me about attacks – locations and dates. I passed this information on to my contacts at the security service.”

Today he holds no grudge against the Belgium security services and continues to work with them. “One thing everyone in Britain should know: there are thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of Muslims out there who hate you. They look at the history of the Palestinian problem and blame Britain; they look at Iraq and Syria and blame you for creating the conditions for the wars and then for joining the Americans in the indiscriminate bombing of the brothers and sisters. They blame you for the Middle East and all its problems, from Saudi Arabia to Yemen to Iran.” The terror attacks on London and Manchester have shown what happens when Islamist groups exploit this hatred. If we are to beat terrorism and defend ourselves against more attacks we will need more Muslims like AlDe’emeh to offer their services to their country.

SECURITY AND TERRORISM

By Robert Verkaik

Sunday Telegraph. July 29th 2018

RICH RUSSIAN oligarchs are deserting Britain’s public schools, as the economic reality of the new cold war starts to bite.
Figures published by the Independent Schools Council (ISC), which represents 1,300 private schools in the UK, reveal a steep decline in numbers of Russian pupils being taught in the UK over the last three years.
The trend is believed to have been exacerbated by the nerve agent attack against a former Russian spy and his daughter in Salisbury in March this year.
Relations between Russia and Britain soured after Sergei and his daughter Yulia were targetted by the Russian state using a soviet-made poison called novichok.
A number of Russian diplomats and their families, including children at leading public schools, were expelled from the UK as Theresa May had no hesitation in blaming the Kremlin for master-minding the attack.

YULIA SKRIPAL and the ‘art of disappearing’: Assuming a new identity in the internet age. By Robert Verkaik. The i June 25th.

The lives of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia will never be the same again. After surviving a murder attempt alleged to be by the Russian state, they must now prepare to disappear, take on new identities and say goodbye to family and friends for ever. Yulia Skripal left hospital this week and will have already entered a shadow state of safe houses, false passports and Government-issued credit cards. She still needs medical care and may have begun her secret new life in the safety of a private medical clinic, away from the attention of the media, including unscrupulous members of the Russian press who found their way into Salisbury hospital where the Skripals were being treated.

FORMER SPIES who received six-figure redundancy pay-offs have been re-employed by MI6 as part of a massive £1.2 billion spend by Britain’s security services on hundreds of agents and outside contractors.
Three MI6 officers who received compensation packages are among 73 spies to be rehired by the service in a scramble to reverse staff cuts in the wake of the heightened terror threat facing the UK.
The Government’s top secret listening station, GCHQ, has rehired 200 former employees while MI5 has taken on just seven former officers.
But MPs have criticised the recruitment policy as “very poor value for money” which “highlight a lack of adequate skills planning.”
Members of Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee said in their annual report: “Whilst it may always be necessary to re-hire some former staff in exceptional circumstances, this should be kept to a minimum given the potentially significant costs involved.”
The overall cost of hiring consultants and contractors for last year reached £1.2 billion, a third of the combined budget of MI6, GCHQ and MI5. The report found that on average these temporary contractors were being paid up to £144,000 – twice the annual salary of their in-house staff.
In 2011 it was reported that twelve senior MI6 officers had won generous pay and pension packages as part of a secret deal struck with Ministers, ahead of a clampdown on civil servant pay in 2010.
The new report said “This Committee previously criticised an expensive redundancy exercise run by SIS in 2011/12, when it made payments to 111 staff to take early retirement. Given that a few years later it is looking to increase staff numbers by considerably more than this, it does not appear to have been well planned.”
The head of MI6, Sir Alex Younger, refused to justify the policy, telling MPs: “I make it a rule not to comment on decisions made by my predecessors… I was not in the leadership then… It was an extraordinary time, do you remember? It was just after the banking crisis and all of that”.
MI6 is in the process of boosting its staff numbers from 2,368 full-time equivalent staff at March 2014 to 3,231 staff by March 2020 – a 36% increase in headcount over six years.
Questioned on whether it would be possible to bring in so many new staff so quickly, MI6 said: “So we are very aware that it is a challenge. If I focus on the absorption as opposed to the recruitment for the moment, a lot of the investment that we have been doing this year is in the things that will enable that, recruitment included, and up powering our learning and development effort, and we are looking really hard at what sort of people we bring in and where we are going to put them and then making sure they are going to be alongside people who are more experienced.”
MI6 was also asked to justify a £800,000 cost for employing outside business consultants to reorganise the structure of the service.
The report, pubished last month, found that GCHQ was facing competition from private tech and internet companies who could offer bigger pay-packets to attract its staff to the private sector.

Sunday Telegraph by Robert Verkaik

23 DECEMBER 2017 • 9:00PM

A British Muslim man who claimed he was discriminated against after being stopped and questioned by police under terrorism laws has won the right to challenge the secret intelligence used against him.

The case could have far-reaching implications for the security services who use undisclosed intelligence to conduct tens of thousands of random stops at airports each year.

Shayab Miah, from Southampton, was stopped and detained for an hour by counter-terrorism police at Heathrow Airport after returning from India in August 2009.

Later Mr Miah, who was released without further action, complained to the Metropolitan Police that his detention was not based on a random stop but motivated by religious discrimination.

Sunday Telegraph by Robert Verkaik
18 NOVEMBER 2017 • 10:00PM

British spies have been citing a controversial security company, which is run by a former KGB-trained intelligence expert, to help warn the public about cyber and hacking attacks.
GCHQ, the UK’s frontline in cyber defence, has five times in the last year published “threat alerts” based on Moscow-headquartered agency, Kaspersky Lab.
Last week Kaspersky Lab faced claims that its software maybe being used by the Kremlin to spy on British banking customers.
Yet, as recently as November 10th, the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre, which is part of GCHQ, issued a threat alert citing Kaspersky research about the dangers of using dating apps.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/11/18/british-spies-using-controversial-security-company-run-former/